Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) A young man becomes an emergency medical technician in Harlem as a temporary stop before he enters medical school. There, he experiences a range of crises and stressful misadventures, including a mentor who has been numbed to the point that he makes a wrong decision in a life-and-death situation.
About: This is a script based on a book. It made the Black List last year with 10 votes.
Writer: Ryan King (based on the book by Shannon Burke
Details: 106 pages
The only thing I’m going to say before I review this is thank God Shazam comes out on Friday. I need to cleanse myself of the depression this script put me in.
Ollie Cross is a 20-something paramedic trying to get into med school. He’s already been rejected twice. So he figured with a year of doing this on his resume, they’ll change their mind. He’s paired up with the 40-something king of paramedics of the Harlem unit, Gene Rutovsky. Gene hates the world. Hates everything really. But he hates being a paramedic less than he hates everything else, which is why he does it.
We’re dropped into the thick of things immediately. They go to a shooting. Then a man who’s having an asthma attack. Then a motorcycle accident. Then a bunch of kids abusing a dog. And then a girl who jumped off a building. Then a rotting man who died in his apartment alone eating pizza and watching porn. And, of course, the cherry on top, an HIV positive drug addict who was so interested in getting her next high that she gave birth to her baby in the toilet and let it die.
Well, that’s actually where our story begins, on page 67, since that’s where all great stories begin. The woman in question tells them her baby was stillborn, which is why trying to save it doesn’t matter. Rutovsky rushes to check anyway, and confirms that it is, indeed, dead. Except it turns out Rutovsky is lying. The baby was still breathing. But because it’s both HIV positive and will have brain damage for the rest of its life, he decides to smother it, a mercy killing of sorts. Oh yeah. This is a joyous trip, this screenplay.
The baby ends up surviving and Rutovsky gets in trouble from his superiors, who strip him of his paramedic’s license. Since Rutovsky has nothing else to look forward to, he kills himself. Cross then gets a new partner and continues to go on depressing emergency calls. But since the writer had already gone to the bottom of the depression barrel with baby euthanasia and partner suicide, there isn’t anything left to do. So we get a couple more 9-1-1 calls and the movie is over.
How can I put this without sounding mean? This wasn’t my cup of tea.
One of the ways people get angry just by reading something is when they don’t see a point to what’s being written. Everything feels like a big waste of time. There’s no quicker way to anger someone than to waste their time.
Actually, let me back up and compliment the writer on something so this doesn’t become a one-sided rant. The writer created a specific world here. That’s worth something. Specificity in subject matter is imperative to pulling us into your world and believing it. Black Flies achieved that.
But as the script unfolded, nothing beyond that specificity emerged. It was just a serious look at serious things dialed up to serious levels from serious characters so that we could feel like something serious was going on. I’m not saying I wanted the Will Smith Bad Boys version of this story. But I also didn’t want to be suicidally depressed for 107 minutes. I honestly wonder what writers are thinking sometimes. They’re so focused on executing their vision that they forget to ask what they want the audience to feel during the story. Why would you write a movie that just made people feel bad about life and depressed about the world?? Where’s the value in that? Where’s the freaking hope?
The script doesn’t even have a story. Where’s the PROBLEM that sets our hero off on a JOURNEY? The closest thing we get is the HIV stillborn baby death. But like I said, that happens on page 67. Everything is just a series of emergency call vignettes. That’s fine if this were real life. But it’s not. It’s a movie. A movie is where you make sense of the madness. It’s where you zoom in on the most interesting aspect of your idea and build a story around it, a plot that evolves, that gives our characters direction, makes us feel like we’re moving towards a destination.
So what you’d probably do is have the baby thing happen on page 25. Then, as they continue to go on these calls, the attempted baby-killing works its way through the system, putting a constant cloud over both of them. The mother wants to sue the hospital. The hospital is trying to cover certain things up. Some of the other paramedics want to rat Rutovsky out. Cross is going to be deposed. He has to decide if he’s going to lie or not. That would allow you to keep this vignette-style storytelling but still feel like the script has a destination, sort of like the way Flight was structured. Everything is leading towards that deposition. But, alas, we don’t get anything approaching that level of storytelling acumen.
On top of that, the script hits the same beat over and over again. All the way through. There isn’t one laugh in the entire script. It’s all serious serious serious serious serious. No, I take that back. In order to haze the new guy, the paramedics throw a dead dog through his car windshield. This is what acts as humor in this screenplay. You know you’re writing a joyous experience when you’re throwing dog death into the mix.
Look, I’m guessing this is some autobiographical year in the life experience someone had that they turned into a book. It all sounds real. But this is the exact opposite of what people want right now. We have enough hate and anger being thrown at us through the news and social media. What movies do best is they help us escape that for a couple of hours. They make us feel good. They make us smile and remind us not to take life so seriously. This script does the opposite of that. I don’t get it. The only reason I’m not giving it a “What the hell did I just read” is because it’s not written badly. It’s just a super depressing script without a story.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This script made a crucial early mistake. It didn’t set up Cross’s life before he became a paramedic. The reason this was such a misstep was that we had nothing to compare Cross’s crazy life as a paramedic to. When you don’t give us that visual comparison, we don’t think what’s happening is that big of a deal. If you show Cross yukking it up with friends and happy and having date nights with his girlfriend THEN you smash to his first day on the job which has multiple people spread out on the street bleeding from gun shots, you get that, “Oh my God, we’re in a completely different universe now” reaction.
What I learned 2: For those of you saying, “But Carson, didn’t you just hold a three month contest about starting your script with a great first 10 pages?” Yes. But just because you’re not starting your script with action doesn’t mean you can’t entertain us. That’s what the great writers do. They find an entertaining angle to almost any situation. And even when they can’t, they know to re-conceive the scene to something that DOES allow them to create an entertaining scenario.
